DISCLOSURE DAY**

Bless his heart! Steven Spielberg still thinks that network news is relevant. Steven Spielberg still thinks that if people watch something on network news that they'll believe it. Steven Spielbering still thinks that Roswell is cool. Steven Spielberg is still obsessed with midwest middle-class childhood Americana. Steven Spielberg still believes that, in the words of Woody Allen's MANHATTAN, "you have to have a little faith in people". FFS. Have you not seen the past decade? In the words of Peep Show's Super Hans, "People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people, Jeremy." Which is not to say that Spielberg hasn't made a simultaneously schmaltzy AND cyncal film. How else to explain the very deliberate care to tell ticket-buyers in Red States that the existence of aliens is compatible with the Book of Genesis?

Okay so what's the plot? Super intelligent aliens have been making contact with man since Roswell, and man - or at least American men - have been hushing it up and exploiting them ever since. A bunch of rebels (Colman Domingo, Josh O'Connor) steal the video proof and rather than just uploading it to TikTok they partner up with Emily Blunt's TV weather girl to put it out on local TV. That's it.

Now there are a bunch of MacGuffins and side hustles involving Blunt's character being able to suddenly speak a bunch of languages, and O'Connor's character being a maths savant, and Eve Hewson's character having a crisis of faith, but it's all just bollocks really. Colin Firth occasionally turns up in a turtleneck as a cross between Dr Evil and Basil Exposition and almost every line reading of a deeply hackneyed script (David Koepp and Spielberg) prompts unintended mirth.

And my enjoyment is not helped by the fact that Emily Blunt now falls into that category of actor (Bradley Cooper, Emma Stone, Nicole Kidman) whose plastic surgery and over-filled face is a distraction. I spent the entire movie wanting to give her an antihistamine. 

Oh yes, this being Spielberg there's also a weird-ass interlude featuring a Hansel and Gretel house and some poor kid has gone through CGI. I was wondering if Emily Blunt's face is now so waxy and unreal that they were forced to CGI a real kid to make her look like Blunt's younger facsimile.  The CGI is really bad by the way. The CGI animals are rubbish. I have seen a more convincing and emotionally affecting fox on Lego Masters Australia.

It's sad to see an old man stuck in 1987 and churning out sci-fi as if the past thirty years of film-making (or politics for that matter) didn't happen. Has he not watched any Gareth Edwards or Denis Villeneuve? Are we meant to be impressed by car chases that look like the Dukes of Hazzard when we just saw Paul Thomas Anderson break cinematic ground not once but twice in ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER? 

Retire, mate. Retire.

DISCLOSURE DAY is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 145 minutes. It is on global release.

JAY KELLY**** - BFI London Film Festival 2025 - Day 3

JAY KELLY is a film with a simple and arguably trite message: those who pursue success at all costs end up not alone but lonely.  Inevitably, when it comes to movie stars, the cost is paid by wives and children.  It’s ground that we have seen trodden from 81/2 to ALL THAT JAZZ and countless films in between.  Trite, but also relatable.  Every parent who has had to take a business meeting or a business trip and missed their kid’s school concert can empathise. Everyone who has reached a certain age and looks back on decisions that seemed like they weren’t even choices at the time, but are bitterly regretted in retrospect, can sympathise. So this is a strange film that seems obvious but somehow hits home.  I laughed a lot, I rolled my eyes on occasion, but in the end the characters, and the central love story, really stuck with me.

George Clooney stars as the eponymous ageing film star whose mid-life crisis is triggered by a trio of guilt-inducing events. First off, his old mentor and movie director (Jim Broadbent) dies - a man that Kelly abandoned when he fell out of fashion.  Second, Kelly runs into an old fellow acting class student, played in youth by The House of Guinness’ Louis Partridge and as an old man by The Morning Show’s Billy Crudup.  That student had a lot of talent but ultimately was too nervous to ace the audition that Kelly ultimately won.  The resentment lingers.  Third, Kelly has to confront his woeful relationship with his two daughters when his youngest leaves for a European vacation.  The eldest (Riley Keough, superb in a cameo) feels her abandonment as a child keenly, and that relationship feels the hardest to fix.  But both young women seem refreshingly grounded.

So we think this is a movie about family, and I guess it is.  And let’s not pretend that Jay is going to fix 35 years of bad choices over a long weekend in Italy.  But the movie wants us to realise that he’s not the only one. Every member of his team, but principally his agent (Adam Sandler) and his publicist (Laura Dean), are putting their lives on hold to minister to his every need and enable his success.  One by one this movie strips him of their comforting support blanket. I am not sure if there is any major character development or revelation.  But a near-final scene of surprising tenderness between Sandler and Clooney shows the real danger of believing that you have chosen a family above your own.  The movie title tragedy is Jay’s but the real tragedy is his agent’s. 

Overall, JAY KELLY is a deceptively slow-moving gentle comedy that hits harder than you might realise on a first watch.  It does not contain the visceral anger of writer-director Noah Baumbach’s MARRIAGE STORY, but in working with debut feature writer Emily Mortimer, Baumbach has created something more melancholy and wistful, despite the brilliant cheesecake gags.

JAY KELLY is rated R and has a running time of 132 minutes. It played Venice, San Sebastian, Telluride and now London. It opens on November 14th in cinemas and on December 5th on Netflix.

THE PERFECT COUPLE*

How many shows can we watch where Nicole Kidman plays a beautiful, uptight, brittle, rich woman trapped in a miserable marriage but struggling to hold on to her perfectly manicured life? Enough already.

In this latest iteration she plays a successful murder-mystery writer living in a gorgeous summer house in Nantucket with her handsome husband (Liev Schreiber), hosting the wedding of her second son.  The night before the wedding, the bridesmaid is found drowned and the wedding is cancelled.

Whodunnit? We discover in short order that the bridesmaid was pregnant by the paterfamilias, that the first son is a feckless trader in financial trouble, and the bride is actually in love with the groomsman.  And that's just the first couple of episodes. The set-up is that of a classic Agatha Christie mystery where lots of family members have motives that we have to untangle.  Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman is both a master of PR and selling books, but also trying to move away from her image as part of the "perfect couple".  Her best-selling novels feature a crime detecting couple similar to Christie's Tommy and Tuppence - an alliterative crime-busting perfect husband and wife, and the author's marriage is part of the marketing drive.

The six-part TV show is handsomely cast and handsomely filmed in a lavish Cape Cod mansion. Everyone looks the part.  And yet something about the script and performances feels flat. The show just never takes flight. I never cared. Also, if you know your Christie, the solution is pretty easy to figure out. (More on that in the spoiler section after the release information.)

I think the problem is that while director Susanne Bier is great at creating context and a luxury lifestyle on screen, a murder mystery has to be more than Nora Ephron lifestyle porn. It has to hook us in.  And the modern audience demands more of its murder mysteries, especially those set amongst the super-rich. In a post WHITE LOTUS world, THE PERFECT COUPLE just feels plain vanilla - too straight - too dull - too obvious.  Only the wonderful Dakota Fanning seems to be in a different show and to really be having fun with it.  

THE PERFECT COUPLE debuted on Netflix this week. 

SPOILERS - I have not read the source novel by Elin Hilderbrand but understand that the solution is far more ambiguous in the novel. It tells you everything you need to know about how plain vanilla the adaptation is that they decided to give you a proper murderer and motive and then to tie everything up by having a resolution between the author and the bride too.  The lone attempt to spice things up with the author's sketchy backstory feels very shoehorned in. It didn't cohere.

FLORA AND SON*

FLORA AND SON is the latest music-themed romantic drama from writer-director-composer John Carney (ONCE). I wasn't entirely convinced by that film, and even less so by this one. Nepo baby Eve Hewson stars as foul-mouthed single-mum Flora who gifts her light-fingered son a second-hand guitar. He proves more interested in creating shit rap songs on Apple's Garage Band in a scene of crass product placement that sounded like something Goldie Looking Chain would pen as a spoof.  So Flora takes the online guitar lessons herself, being tutored by Joseph Gordon Levitt's LA-based songwriter. Predictably, their online lessons are soon shown without the Zoom framing device and they are sharing romantic song-writing dates in the same frame. We roll toward a mawkish finale and I was still semi-hopeful we'd at least get a good final song out of it, as we did with ONCE. But no such luck.

FLORA AND SON is rated R and has a running time of 97 minutes. The movie played Sundance and Toronto 2023 and was released on Apple+ this weekend.

ROBIN HOOD (2018)

Otto Bathurst's remake of the Robin Hood myth is a dismal effort. His directorial style is sub Guy Ritchie - all mockney bovver without any of Ritchie's kinetic energy or wit. The resulting film is a CGI heavy mess, full of dull action scenes and bad performances acting out a worse script.  Lead actor Taron Egerton has none of the charm or glee of his KINGSMAN role playing "Rob".  Eve Hewson is very pretty as his working class girlfriend Marion, but she has to also play a woman who thinks her boyfriend died in the crusades, only to find him inconveniently alive while she's shacked up with Jamie Dornan's Will Scarlett. Neither she nor the script betray the requisite emotional depth or range to pull off that storyline.  And WTF is Dornan doing here? Recent turns on UK TV show he's actually a very good actor.  He's definitely playing well below himself here. The same can be said of Ben Mendelsohn doing that evil villain thing he's done countless times before, not least in ROGUE ONE. He looks bored doing it, so it's no surprise we're bored seeing it. As for F Murray Abraham - magisterial in AMADEUS - he's utterly anonymous here.  Avoid at all costs.  

ROBIN HOOD is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 116 minutes. It was released last year and is now available to rent and own.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 15 - THIS MUST BE THE PLACE

Rabartu Smitu, Rabartu Smitu, 

tashiwa ga suki Rabartu Smitu

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE is a visually inventive but often frustratingly slow-paced film that bravely tries to juxtapose whimsical comedy and serious history with problematic results. 

Sean Penn plays an ageing, bored and depressed former goth rock-star called Cheyenne. His high-pitched voice and Robert Smith clothes mark him as a man-child, trapped in his adolescence, but anchored by the love of his down-to-earth wife, Jane (Frances McDormand) and the friendship of emotionally scarred fan-girl, Mary. The death of his father forces Cheyenne back to America. Almost on a whim, he sets off on a meandering road-trip, searching for the Nazi that had tormented his father. But despite a very moving late scene of confession and humiliation, this is not really a revenge movie at all, but rather a character drama about an estranged son breaking beyond that emotional vacuum in order to become a man.

The casting is strong - with Sean Penn and Frances McDormand complemented by strong cameos from Harry Dean Stanton, Judd Hirsch (as a Simon Wiesenthal cipher) and Heinz Lieven as the Nazi. And the script, by Umberto Contarello, contains many belly-laughs, and superlative dramatic set-pieces. But as with all Paolo Sorrentino movies, the true stars are Luca Bigazzi's fluid, deliberate, elegant camera-work and the flamboyant use of the musical score, this time, by the legendary David Byrne. Technically, this film is flawless and imaginative. 

But it didn't grab me, fascinate me, in the same way as Sorrentino's previous films - IL DIVO and THE FAMILY FRIEND. This is partly because the character of Cheyenne is, however sympathetic, also rather slow and whimsical, and after a while this started to grate. It's partly because the road-trip in the second half is so random and slow. I know that this is the point - that is should have the kind of magic and wonder of THE STRAIGHT STORY - but I did become very impatient with it. And finally, I guess I just felt too uncomfortable with the deliberate juxtaposition of the Holocaust with the character of Cheyenne - the man least likely to come to mind as a Nazi hunter. Something about the man using the hunt for the Nazi as a kind of distraction from a life of satiety, and then as a kind of agent toward self-knowledge, felt weird and exploitative. I know this was a deliberate provocation from Sorrentino - but for me it just didn't work. 

THIS MUST BE THE PLACE played Cannes 2011 where it won the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. It opened earlier this year in France and is currently on release in Italy. It opens in Germany on November 10th, in Sweden on November 18th, in the US in December, in Australia on December 26th, in Poland on February 3rd, in Spain in March and in the UK on March 9th.